Of Flowers and Beds

I am a manic, monkey-minded creature, forever on the lookout for ways to achieve a sense of calm. I invest in books with names like Color Me Mindful, but when I break out the pencils I get all anxious and indecisive about the multitude of possible color combinations. How can I possibly choose? Traditional meditation only kicks my busy mind into overdrive. Mantras sometimes help (May I be filled with loving kindness, may I be peaceful and at ease), but mostly I struggle and crave distractions like audiobooks with thriller plots or TV dramas about corrupt cops. Then the only way I can sleep through the night is to take a small but powerful pill, providing la petit mort that's critical if I'm going to start over the next brand new day.

One place I can actually be alert yet mindful is a botanic garden. Within the flowers and ornamental grasses and bees abuzz is a sweet, organic sense of peace. I enjoy wandering around with a friend, taking mediocre, closeup pictures of the surprising or the weird. The best scenario, though, is to be alone, quietly staring into the endless center of a flower, so deep my mind goes beautifully, effortlessly blank and unharried.

I was introduced 30 years ago to Georgia O'Keeffe's art when I marveled at a grand exhibit poster of an iris which hung above the bed. Most famous for her large scale, zoomed in paintings of flowers, O'Keeffe's work was the first art of the modern period that I felt like I really, truly got.

In the Leibovitz Pilgrimage exhibit, Annie doesn't focus on Georgia's flowers. The photo is a closeup section of her tightly made bed. An article in The New Yorker claims that the many beds and dressers in the Pilgrimage exhibit suggest a shadow of death hanging over everything. I don't get that at all. I see a bed as emphasizing life, everyday, ordinary life. Just like flowers in their loamy beds. Sure, they die, but they come back, year after year, reminders of the endless circle of life. And yes, that's an eye-rolling cliche, but Kerouac said it best: "A cliche is a truism and truisms are true." We all lie down in bed at night. And while sleep is la petit mort, the tiny death, it's a death from which most of us are lucky enough to rise again, like flowers opening to the dawn.

Georgia’s Pelvis

Georgia O’Keeffe is a skinny little thing

all protruding bones

and gnarled fingers

She breaks her pastel chalks

clenching them so hard

and makes smooth hues

out of harsh landscapes

They soften under her gaze

Her gentle vision a blunt

contrast to her bones

That jutting pelvis